Bring back the mammoth to fight global warming? It’s not as crazy as it sounds

In the barren reaches of Arctic Siberia, Sergey and Nikita Zimov, a Russian father-and-son team of scientists, are working on geoengineering measures that sound as if they’re ripped from the pages of a Michael Crichton novel: reintroduce a massive, bygone ecosystem to the Eurasian steppe, including mammoths developed from elephant-mammoth DNA hybrids. Their plan is not, however, just for their own amusement – it’s to fight global warming. Placed in context, their idea isn’t nearly as farfetched as it sounds: the massive permafrost covering much of Siberia is in grave danger of melting away. If it does, dormant microbes frozen in the soil would wake and release enormous quantities of carbon into the air, creating a potentially disastrous climate feedback loop. According to the Zimovs, a new, thriving steppe ecosystem teeming with large, roaming herbivores – Pleistocene Park, as they call it – could keep the dangerous carbon insulated in the ground. And those mammoths that have been extinct for millennia? Thanks to the new gene-editing technology CRISPR, they could be just years away. At once a rather curious father-son portrait, and a revealing investigation of the inventive and extraordinary measures needed to fight global warming, Mammoth is the US filmmaker Grant Slater’s video companion piece to an article by Ross Andersen, senior editor at The Atlantic and former Aeon deputy editor.

Snap matchmaking: Indian expats seek the perfect picture to get a wife back home

In Singapore’s bustling Little India stands a small photography studio that specialises in helping young men – primarily migrant workers from India – find brides back home. The hundreds of portraits that cover the shop’s walls are testament to the hope that a just-right photo is the route towards a good marriage. Searching for Wives follows a charming truck-driver named Partha as he poses for his portrait to enchant a potential wife and, perhaps even more important, her family. In an era where seeking a match via a single photo and just a few bits of information has become commonplace, the Bhutanese filmmaker Zuki Juno Tobgye offers a rather different perspective on the intersection between technology and traditional arranged marriage.

An ageing philosopher returns to the essential question: ‘What is the point of it all?’

‘Being 97 has been an interesting experience.’

By the time of his death, the US philosopher Herbert Fingarette (1921-2018) had lived what most would consider a full and meaningful life. His marriage to his wife, Leslie, was long and happy. His career as professor of philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara was both accomplished and controversial – his book Heavy Drinking (1988), which challenged the popular understanding of alcoholism as a progressive disease, was met with criticism in the medical and academic communities. In a later book, Death: Philosophical Soundings (1999), Fingarette contemplated mortality, bringing him to a conclusion that echoed the Epicureans: in non-existence, there is nothing to fear. But as Being 97 makes evident, grappling with death can be quite different when the thoughts are personal rather than theoretical. Filmed during some of the final months of Fingarette’s life, the elegiac short documentary profiles the late philosopher as he reflects on life, loss, the many challenges of old age, and those lingering questions that might just be unanswerable.

Magnetic and majestic: visualising the powerful storms hidden from human view

Violent plasma explosions from the Sun’s surface – known as coronal mass ejections – reverberate to the farthest reaches of our solar system. However, due to the Earth’s protective magnetosphere, most people don’t take note of these events unless a particularly powerful solar flare disrupts radio signals or produces colourful aurorae near the poles. Created as part of an art installation, this inventive, visceral short uses data collected from the University of Alberta’s CARISMA radio array to sonically and visually interpret a geomagnetic storm high in Earth’s atmosphere. Manifesting the data as a dynamic sculpture, the digital rendering captures the volatility of these usually unseen and unheard phenomena, hinting at their potentially destructive powers.

Chocolate, monsters and mothers – surreal glimpses of our most common dreams

While your dreams might feel strange or random, and unique to you (if you even remember them at all), an ongoing project by the US psychologist Kelly Bulkeley offers some insight into our most common dream experiences. Since 2009, Bulkeley has encouraged people around the world to submit the contents of their dreams to his searchable online Sleep and Dream Database, which has thus far collected accounts of some 30,000 dreams. This appropriately surreal short video imagines a composite dream as it divulges some of the fascinating insights from the database, including the food you’re most likely to encounter while sleeping (chocolate), and the person you’re most likely to come across (mother, of course).